Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @04:25PM
from the amazing-laser dept.

disco_tracy writes "Modern militaries depend on fuel. Nearly 80 percent of the supplies delivered to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan consist of fuel, and it's no surprise that those military convoys are frequently the targets of insurgents. In the last decade, 1000 soldiers have died delivering gasoline to military operations. A new approach using lasers could provide power to drones in flight or to machines on the ground and remove the need for gas deliveries to army bases."

From coal fired generators. Afghanistan has plenty of coal. Another option is solar arrays. Afghanistan also has plenty of sunshine.

I was thinking more along the lines of a nuclear reactor. It's no secret that the military has been working on nuclear power plants that will fit inside a 40 foot ISO container. I don't know how much power one of these reactors can produce but it seems that the military has no shortage of trucks to keep bringing in fuel. Instead of bringing in fuel they can keep stacking up nuclear power plants until they have enough to meet their power needs.

So it is too expensive and dangerous to transport fuel, but there is no risk of a coal mine or a solar array being the target of the Taliban? Not to mention the cables, the substations and the actual laser bases.

This thing just smells of trolling for a research grant.

And, by the way, even with the proper definition of order of magnitude (fifth root of 100, not 10 - Wikipedia is wrong here because the term was invented for astronomy) coal and sunshine are not orders of magnitude cheaper than avgas, unless yo

This meme will never get old. Never. 20 year from now, we'll still be associating sharks with lasers. They (the people 20 year from now) won't know *why* the two are related, but at that point it won't matter, it'll become vestigial. And all of this because ACs like you. Thank you.

Sounds like vaporware, which works out well for the government. They will spent zillions of dollars to find out, crap, it doesn't work.
Lasers can't bend very well, so you need line of sight. Then, I have to ask, what powers the laser?
Hell, I have a great idea on making a perpetual motion device. Okay, not really, but I might, and I'll gladly accept zillion of dollars to prove to you that it doesn't work.

well i suggest to add "can be powered by laser" to the proposal for the Comanche helicopter and try again to build it. i mean 7billion$ and 2 prototypes, thats just 3.5 billion per piece. Now if lets say 10 prototypes could be build with the laser power supply for lets say 4 billion more than the price per piece has dropped to 1/3, that sound economical to me.

TFA also said it could be used at night. Now I'm thinking that a formerly stealthy UAV is going to have a 1kW infrared laser pointing at its belly. By prying out the little IR filter from my cell phone's camera, it can quite clearly see IR. If they deploy these, how long will it take before bad guys are scanning the skies with their modified cell phone cameras? "Hey, look at that glowing thing flying over us. Must be American UAV."

a) I can't imagine drones account for much gasb) With lasers drone will be limited to line-of-sightc) Laser power will require *much* more energy than gas, where will the power for the lasers come from?d) It's a crap idea which will never work

c) Laser power will require *much* more energy than gas, where will the power for the lasers come from?

What I'm wondering is how much energy is lost on the way. Also, how does weather effect this system?
This might be useful for UAVs that are always close to base, possibly on a repeating patrol pattern. But even then: "David Graham is CEO of Powerbeam, a company that uses a similar technology to deliver small amounts of power to home appliances. He says the advantages of powering a UAV via a beam are lost because of the distances involved"

I have to wonder if the truly obviously "What moran thought that would work?" ideas the military has (that ALWAYS seem to get some funding) aren't a cover for their black bag projects.

Think about it, nobody really investigates any further because the idea was dumb as shit from the start so of course it didn't work, the really dumb shit projects only get funded (usually) for a few years, just enough to pay for some little nasty ops, and when it is "canceled" because it is a stupid idea nobody is really surp

US forces use mostly aviation fuel, from abram's tank (check the specks, it's a gas turbine engine) to predator drone, one single fuel supply to power the lot is easier on the logistics. Now the rest of NATO still uses diesel engines a lot still in their tanks and ships (which is why the challenger 2 is slower than the abrams they are pretty similar past that).

In the last decade, 1000 soldiers have died delivering gasoline to military operations.

And how many of those thousands were during combat operations? Less than 100. Distort things much? You're still going to need to get fuel to the laser so it can power the drone... unless you think its just going to run on sunshine and rainbows?

Most fuel accidents happen no where near combat zones due to people being slack. Tensions in combat zones and natural selection tend to keep things actually safer in that respect.

As with most things related to the military, some idiot gets a number, then goes completely doom and gloom, and suddenly OMFG WE GOTTA STOP THAT!

Let me tell you what the lazier based solution does... gives them something to see in order to know A) Where the object needing fuel is located at as its being fueld and... B) The location of the refueling system. Invisible laser you say? Doesn't exist. You may not see it with the naked eye, but it'll have enough interference in the atmosphere to leave a detectable effect regardless of wavelength if it has enough energy to provide power to a drone over any sort of distance. Put on the right goggles and it'll shine for you, then you shot down the drown and mortor the refueling point. As they say in Counter Strike... Terrorist win.

Note: I as expected, did not read the actual article, just the summary. Its more fun that way.

Combat? Who said anything about combat? And what does combat matter? Or are you saying soldier's lives only count if they're killed in combat?

Soldiers die all the time; the military is a fairly high-risk job even in peacetime. The important question is, will they be less likely to die in whatever new duty they're given once they stop driving trucks in Afghanistan.

If the Army follows the suggestion up above about mining coal in Afghanistan to power the lasers, I think we can be pretty sure that more soldiers will die doing that than driving trucks to deliver drone fuel.

AS for rainbows, they could use the drug crops and turn it into biofuels.

I person is killed form enemy action for every 24 convoys. So, yea 1000 killed due to enemy action sounds about right.

"As with most things related to the military, some idiot gets a number, then goes completely doom and gloom, and suddenly OMFG WE GOTTA STOP THAT!As with most thing in the military, it did not happen that way.

Wow, how awesome, you replied to me to show me whats up... but posted absolutely nothing related to the article being discussed.

I'm aware of solar power, its not unique to the military... its also in no way a viable energy source for military operations anywhere and won't be any time soon, if ever, which is highly unlikely regardless to how many companies you post that claim to be making stuff for the military. My company makes stuff for the military too, it has jack shit to do with any sort of thing tha

2700 people may have died, but what about the wounded? And we're not talking "guy got shot, made complete recovery" we're talking "missing legs, arms, faces". In Iraq alone the official number is over 33,000 and quite possibly a good deal higher.

The Army should be mindful of respecting Gaia, and go green, using solar power for this.
And, we don't want those nasty insurgents blowing up the solar arrays to disable the drones, so let's put them -- in space!

I mean, really, doesn't it make more sense to bankrupt ourselves investing in useful infrastructure rather than just squandering our wealth in blowing up some rocks and brown people. At least this way, we can accomplish both at the same time.

FTA: "Do you know how many people have died delivering gasoline?" said Tom Nugent, president and co-founder of LaserMotive, a Kent, Wash.-based company looking to replace fossil fuels with laser power. The answer to Nugent's question? Nearly 1,000 soldiers in the last decade. And that's why Nugent wants to drastically reduce the need for delivering fossil fuels. His company's approach could save lives."

Total snake-oil bait-and-switch bullshit. There is absolutely nothing in the article to suggest how this w

"The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer."
I suspect if those tankers only had to go a kilometer, not as many of the soldiers would have died.

Launching stuff into orbit is great, but why would humans want to migrate off of earth? Migrate to where? Orbital communities? The moon? Mars? Certainly you can't be suggesting migration to other stars, as the closest ones with potentially habitable planets are anywhere from 20 - 40 million light years away.

Someone already said it, and I'll say it again: WHERE DOES THE LASER ENERGY COME FROM?I am *so* sick of this sort of lazy, pathetic science reporting.

How to be a popular science reporter in three easy steps:

Step 1: start by describing a serious real-world issue.Step 2: write a bridge that makes a mockery of the laws of physics to:Step 3: describe minor scientific result which has nothing to do with Step 1.

You can try this at home!

"Millions of people in the world are malnourished. But perhaps that can all c

An aircraft that runs on fuel has to carry said fuel, therefore requiring more fuel to carry the fuel itself. Even if the laser is powered by an base generator running on fuel, it will save fuel by removing the power cost of carrying the fuel on board the aircraft.
Also the laser allows powering the aircraft with out having to land. That will eliminate many takeoffs which are the most fuel expensive part of the average flight.
And the on base generator could run on far lower grades of fuel than JP5 saving

That only holds true if the process of converting the original fuel source into radiation (what a laser is) and BACK into useful energy is more efficient than carrying kerosine with it in flight.

So in principle it could save energy, in reality, modern lasers are incredibly inefficient when shooting through the atmosphere of a room in a test lab, let alone several kilometers of open atmosphere... in the desert... where its full of dust... and THEN converting it back into useful energy... which is extreme

The US military does not use gasoline, so I doubt "1000 soldiers have died delivering gasoline to military operations".

The UAVs do indeed run on gasoline, though I'd assume the 1000 number includes all petroleum fuels.It is a bit disappointing, since the Predator is made by General Atomics, who do not live up to their name.

It is interesting to hear that the military has a plentiful and easily transportable source of power for the lasers, because otherwise it would be insane to convert the energy to laser power and then back to something else (presumably electricity) and take the efficiency loss hit at each step. Now if they would just let the American public have access to that free energy rather than keep it to themselves and Area 51 then we could power the country without the need for foreign oil and get our noses out of th